There may be little left for Apple to announce about its purported tablet or “iSlate” come January 27, a date change since January 26 was noised about. The rumor mill is slowly teasing out all its secrets.
The great unveiling, according to the Financial Times, is still supposed to be at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, but now it’s supposedly on the last Wednesday of the month rather than the last Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal came running out late Monday with the news – shared by “people briefed by the company” – that Apple won’t start delivering the tablet until March. The New York Times said the same thing. It also said there “hasn’t been this much hype about a tablet since Moses came down from the mountain.”
The Journal said it heard the tablet will have a netbook-like diagonal 10-inch to 11-inch screen, apparently confirming what some said right after Christmas and with what the former head of Google China Kai-Fu Lee said on his personal blog. TheJournal allowed that Apple could come out with multiple versions at different price points, although it guided toward roughly a thousand bucks, “possibly including a subscription to a nationwide Wi-Fi wireless service.”
It’s convinced the device will be multi-purpose and will let users watch movies and TV shows, play games, surf the Web and read e-books, textbooks and whatever’s left of newspapers.
There’s been some debate over whether the thing’s a full-fledged computer or only a big iPod Touch. The former would mean it could run Windows 7 and Windows apps. And at a thousand bucks a pop, it had better be a computer – true even at the roughly $800 Gismodo’s quoting.
Apple Insider thinks the tablet’s touch screen keyboard will have a tactile, Braille-like feel based on a newly discovered patent – a boon for people who touch-type. DigiTimes said Foxconn, which already makes iPods and iPhones, will produce it.
Australia’s Smarthouse said Google will follow with an Android-based tablet – others say the Chrome OS, but the device will be made and sold by HTC and built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and have the latest Adobe software.
After a power outage that delayed things a half-hour, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer opened this year’s CES and briefly showed off three detail-free Windows 7-based tablets of various sizes – Microsoft’s done tablets for years and never got the attention Apple has – that will be coming down the pike maybe by mid-year from HP, Pegatron and Archos.
None of them were the rumored “Courier,” the Apple-killing, book-like, dual-screen slate that Microsoft has reportedly been working on with HP.
Presumably trying to make an iSlate moment, Ballmer described them as “almost as portable as a phone and as powerful as a PC running Windows 7.”
The HP device can use Amazon’s Kindle software. It can also surf and play videos, and it reportedly has multi-touch capabilities. It’s supposed to sell for around $500.
The little-known Phone Arena blog claims to be quoting Apple internal documents that say the iSlate is built on a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip.
We think not. To Intel’s chagrin, Apple’s iPhone uses an ARM core in a Samsung chip. Otherwise, Phone Arena claims the tablet can support 2GB-8GB of RAM with a 120GB SATA drive and has a webcam, two USB ports, an SD slot, stereo speakers, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an operating system called Mac OS X Clouded Leopard 10.7.
It also says it will include iTunes, Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, Spotlight, Dashboard, Mail, iChat, Safari of course, Address Book, QuickTime, iCal, Photo Booth and Front Row.
It says the touch screen won’t show fingerprints.